With the current increase in interest in wood burning equipment to alleviate the impact of the energy shortage, means for splitting logs to provide firewood is also in increased interest.
Past practice has been mostly manual. Logs were sawed to stove length and then split by use of an ax or a maul and one or more wedges. This practice made good exercise, but is neither very fast nor very efficient.
Powered devices have generally attempted simply to duplicate the use of a maul and wedges. Nearly all have used a vertical stroke of a hammer type device to drive a wedge into the section of log being split and have been relatively clumsy.
Among the powered devices currently in use are hydraulic ram type devices having a single stroke. These require an operator to move controls for each stroke, and therefore require resetting of the block to be split each time. With our device, we use a continuous stroke. The operator then can keep close to the block being split, and can in fact simply grasp the block and turn it to a new position after each stroke. The result is a much faster operation.
By our invention we thus provide a compact and efficient device to split the wood. We can use a relatively small engine for power and by use of a large flywheel still provide a large driving force to drive the wedge into the block. The device is also usable to shear long pieces of wood laterally thus breaking longer pieces into pieces of fireplace length or the like.